Dimon Kendrick-Holmes: Partially hidden from view

During the monologue of Sunday night's "Golden Globe" awards, Tina Fey introduced one of the nominees like this: " The movie 'Selma' is about the civil rights movement that totally worked and now everything's fine."

Even Oprah laughed.

But the message was not funny: The civil rights movement has not totally worked and everything's not fine.

Oh, and everybody's really uncomfortable talking about it.

Which brings me to the mugshot galleries on our website.

Last summer, the Muscogee County Jail changed the way all media receive mugshots of inmates. This was in response to new legislation prohibiting media outlets that post mugshots from profiting by charging inmates -- or their families -- to remove the photos from the web.

For the record, we've never done such a thing. My primary concern when we started these galleries was that no person could ever use his or her wealth or power to avoid being featured.

If I or one of my family members is ever arrested and charged in Muscogee County with a felony or a DUI, the photo will run in our mugshot gallery. That's a promise. The same thing applies to any employee of the newspaper, regardless of position.

Anyway, since the legislation changed, the jail has been posting inmates' charges on its public website, but inmate photos are now behind a password-protected site, to which media outlets gain access by agreeing to abide by the new state guidelines, which we've done. Each inmate photo is part of an image that contains information like birthdate and race.

When you view an inmate photo on our gallery, it's still about 1-and-a-half-inches wide on a midsize laptop screen, and above the image there's still a preview box containing 13 small, thumbnail photos of other inmates. Each thumbnail is about one-eighth of an inch wide. It's too small to clearly identify the person, but you can tell the color of his or her skin.

Here's the problem: Since the summer, only part of each white mugshot appeared in the preview boxes, but each black mugshot was displayed in full. This led some members of the black community to believe we were intentionally concealing the identity of white inmates.

Here's what was happening (and bear with me, because it's technical): The images of black inmates we get from the jail contain the text line "Race: Black," while the images of white inmates we get from the jail contain the text line "Race: White (includes Mexican and Latinos)." Because they include a longer description of race, the images of white inmates are much wider than the images of inmates categorized as black.

Whenever we load the photos into the gallery, the system we use centers each photo. Because the space allowed for each of the 13 thumbnail images is

proportionally more narrow than the space for the full-sized images, it cuts off wider images (i.e. the white mugshots and text) but is able to accommodate more narrow images (i.e. the black mugshots and text).

No members of the newsroom, including our journalists of African-American descent, saw anything amiss with the new photos. When we selected an individual photo or clicked through the gallery, each photo appeared in full, regardless of race. The thumbnails were so small that we never noticed them. For more than four months, nobody contacted me to raise any questions.

Then in late December, we heard from a black pastor who said he'd gotten numerous complaints about black thumbnails being treated differently from white thumbnails in our mugshot gallery. At that point, we re-examined our process of downloading the photos and decided to start manually cropping mugshots of white inmates by cutting off part of the race text line so that the entire photo would appear in the thumbnail box.

We suspended the mugshot galleries over the holidays, and we started the new plan on the first Monday of the year.

Problem solved, right?

Things like this happen all the time: We handle an enormous amount of information on a daily basis across multiple platforms, and sometimes people have a problem with what we're doing or how we're doing it.

As a human being, I have blind spots in the way I see the world, and so does everybody else. I always welcome the opportunity to answer questions about why we do what we do. Sometimes it opens my eyes about something and leads us to make changes. Always it helps me better understand our audience.

A few days after we fixed the problem with the mugshots, we received this email, with a link to one of our old mugshot galleries: "Please take a look at this and explain to me why the White people's faces are obstructed but the faces of the Black people are not. This is clearly purposeful because there is no way computer error would have only selected the white people to be outside of the margin."

I had two thoughts.

First, this man asked us to explain the situation, while at the same time saying that no explanation would suffice. He'd already made up his mind that we were being racist.

And my second thought was this: I was glad he still reached out to us. Most people who think we hate them won't tell us they think we hate them -- you know, because they think we hate them.

Bottom line, I want you to reach out to me or another member of the newspaper if you have a problem with the way we're covering something. It's hard to confront people, especially when you think they've got their minds made up, and especially when it involves race.

But we can't address a problem if we don't know it exists.

Dimon Kendrick-Holmes, executive editor, dkholmes@ledger-enquirer.com.

This story was originally published January 16, 2015 at 9:04 PM with the headline "Dimon Kendrick-Holmes: Partially hidden from view."